The Porcelain Dove (4 page)

Under her minatory eye, my mistress grew so frightened and so very humble that the novice's face softened a degree. "This being mademoiselle's first night," she said, "she need not sup in the refectory. The morning bell rings at half-past six; someone will fetch mademoiselle at seven. You, girl!"—I curtsied hastily—"See that your mistress is awake and neatly dressed by then." Uncorking her hands, she touched two fingers to Mlle Adèle's brow. "Sleep in the arms of la sainte Vierge, mademoiselle."

No sooner had the door closed behind her than Mlle Adèle cast herself upon my neck. "La sainte Vierge!" she wept. "I cannot
abide
la sainte Vierge! How miserable I am! Oh, Berthe, I love thee above anyone, even madame mère. Say that I may trust thee to stay beside me always!"

I wept in sympathy as I returned her embrace. "Ah, mademoiselle," I cried. "You are an angel, and my only wish is to be worthy of your trust. I swear upon the grave of my mother (upon whose soul be peace) that come what may, I will stand by you. As long as Berthe Duvet draws breath, you shall never want for a loving friend."

I blush now to recall that scene, with its immoderate words and immoderate tears. Yet both tears and words were truly felt, and while I blush for them, I do not repent them.

In her seven years at Port Royal, my mistress learned to dance gracefully and to design and execute embroidery as well or better than her teachers. Her singing was sweet, though thin, and she learned, in time, to perform upon the harp and the clavichord with passable accuracy and great feeling. The geography, the history of France, the rhetoric, the grammar, she might as well have done without, for all the good the lessons did her.

Mlle Adèle was not a dull child, you understand. For example, she learned very quickly that a sitting room, a fire in her bedchamber, two windows upon the rue d'Enfer, and a closet for her maid and her clothes attract envy as surely as honey attracts flies. Its first
manifestation was a scattering of crumbs between her sheets, which trick she shyly reported to her oldest sister Mlle Pauline du Fourchet when that young lady paid her a formal visit of welcome.

"Only crumbs?" laughed Mlle du Fourchet. "Why, they must love you already, Adèle. For me, 'twas pebbles."

"Poor Pauline," said my mistress. "Were you very much hurt?"

"Hurt? Why no, silly child, 'twas only in fun. I put them in the porridge-pot, and oh, how I giggled when the whole school began to spit out pebbles!" She shook her head fondly, a grown woman of fifteen looking back upon the lost pleasures of her youth.

"Shall I then put the crumbs in the porridge?" inquired my mistress anxiously.

Mlle Pauline stood up. "Silly goose," she said sharply. "What fun would that be? What a tiresome chit you are, to be sure." And off she flounced, with an air of washing her hands of us.

So much for Mlle Pauline. And mademoiselle's second sister, Mlle Hortense du Fourchet, was little better.

Poor Mlle Hortense. What a maladroit she was, to be sure. 'Twas hard to believe we were of an age—I was eleven—for her size and quick tongue made her seem much older. She'd a reputation for cleverness among the pensionnaires, though 'twas not the sort of cleverness that was of any use to her. She was forever being punished for rude and heretical remarks—indeed, one of her punishments is among my most vivid memories of Port Royal.

'Twas in our first week, and I was helping serve dinner to the pensionnaires. How clearly I recall it! The clatter of spoons on pottery, the whispers, the giggles, and over it all, a girl's voice reading, unsteady and hoarse with anger. A savor of fish hangs over the memory—it must have been a Friday. The reader is a lubberly girl, broad of face, coarse of feature, ruddy of cheek—you'd think her the daughter of a carter, save for her accent and her fine white apron and cap. A nun stands behind her pointing out the verses with a birch rod. I move through the tables, ladling out fish stew and overhearing the whispers.

"She said women should be kings."

"
I
heard she said women shouldn't marry men."

"Well, look at her. Can you wonder? What man would marry that, had he a choice?"

The reading at an end, the nun closes the Bible and Mlle Hortense du Fourchet scowls out over the scornful throng, enraged and unrepentant.

At first I was inclined to applaud her spirit. My mistress, however, found it alarming, and held Mlle Hortense in the same terrified distrust that I reserved for the nuns. Indeed, Mlle Adèle was alarmed by most people—her fellow-pensionnaires no less than the nuns and lay-teachers—and annoyingly inclined to shrink when addressed, stammer when questioned, and weep when teased. The little girls, stony-hearted as even the best of children are, greeted both her halting recitations and her shy advances with muffled, disdainful giggles. Under this treatment, Mlle Adèle suffered from sick headaches and nightly fits of weeping in which she sobbed and sobbed that she couldn't bear it, that someone
must
love her or she'd die. During these storms, I held her and petted her and told her to be tranquil, that I loved her dearly, that the pensionnaires, yes, and the nuns, too, were all beasts and fools, that had I the power, I'd spell them to spew toads from their mouths with every word, like the woodcutter's daughter who insulted the twelve months.

So much I'd imagined—how she'd need me and how I'd comfort her. What I hadn't imagined was how, when I left her sleeping at last, I'd curl up on my pallet in the windowless closet and weep on my own behalf.

Oh, how I missed my freedom! All my life, I'd been accustomed to threading the streets of Paris with a basket on my arm and a few coins tied in a scrap of linen, to dodging horses and carriage wheels, to staring as I willed at the fine ladies in their chairs and the beggar-women on their street corners. Now Paris had shrunk to a view of the rue d'Enfer and the dome of the royal observatory, and all its varied multitude of rag-sellers, actresses, carters, petits-maîtres, beggars, artisans, and shopkeepers was reduced to a hundred or so nuns, lay servants, and femmes de chambre, all of them older than I and eager to remind me of it at every turn.

They thought themselves duchesses, those femmes de chambre, and sent me running after their fans and shawls and thread as though my flat chest and childish stature made me a lower order of being. Duchesses. Bah! Apes. Curled and perfumed apes, decked out in cheap lace bought with tips from their young ladies' admirers, boasting of their lovers, how rich they were and how handsome, how long they'd linger in the alley behind the buttery on the chance, the mere chance of a kiss. I couldn't understand it, me. What was so wonderful, after all, about pressing lips with a foul-breathed lackey, or allowing your
mistress' brother to put his sweaty hands under your petticoats?

They simpered when I asked, and told me I'd feel very different about it just so soon as my breasts began to grow. Every woman longs for a man's touch, they said.

"The nuns as well?"

They exchanged wise glances, giggles, shrugs. "The nuns as well, my dear. The nuns above all."

Apes, as I said. Yet when all was said and done, they were not unkind to me. Compared to their mistresses, they were ministering angels.

Oh, what torments those infant marquises and comtesses devised for my poor mistress! When she made no public response to the crumbs in her sheets, they went on to cinders, then bricks in her pillow, then a chamber pot's worth of turds spread under her blanket. When I begged mademoiselle to report this last prank to the Mistress of Pensionnaires, she said with some force that she'd rather die than endure an interview with Mme Ursule, a sentiment I understood well enough not to press her.

Not a week later, some wag stole Mlle Adèle's beloved doll and hid it, swaddled in linen, in a young nun's bed. I suspected Mlle Stéphanie-Germaine de Montpelier.

Mlle de Montpelier was a little older than my mistress, wild as a young wolf and sly with it, a child who might have grown to be a great general had she been a boy. Her genius was the planning of elaborate pranks to be executed by one of her faithful lieutenants. In my mistress she found that tyrant's joy, a victim who can be made the willing instrument of her own downfall. Grateful for notice, eager for friendship, my mistress always did just what Stéphanie-Germaine told her to. In catechism once, my poor, innocent lamb brought the righteous wrath of père Méche down upon her own head by asking, at Mlle de Montpelier's suggestion, whether a fairy might go to Heaven if she performed enough good deeds. That ended in her copy of Mme d'Aulnoy's
Contes
being taken from her and a wholly undeserved reputation for blasphemy.

Thus matters stood when, sometime during the first week in Lent, I saw Stéphanie-Germaine and two of her hangers-on creeping out my mistress' door. Their fingers were to their lips, their faces scarlet with suppressed laughter. I smelled mischief on them strong as cheap scent. And yet when I searched mademoiselle's rooms, I found nothing. No
full chamber pot balanced on the door, no lard in her powder, no noxious or painful substance secreted in her bed. Puzzled, I held my peace.

A few days passed—perhaps a week—during which Mlle de Montpelier was suspiciously kind to Mlle Adèle, paying her all manner of friendly attentions. The suspicions, of course, were mine alone; my mistress was beside herself with joy, so full of her dear friend Stéphanie-Germaine that I felt quite vexed with her. The sun shone, the sky was blue. Yet I felt in my bones that a storm approached.

It rolled up, as storms often do, with hardly a rumble of thunder or a cloud to warn us. One minute my mistress was sitting cozily by her fire, frowning over her embroidery. The next minute, the door was flung open to admit that dragon among nuns, Mme Ursule herself, her eyes as hard as dried peas and her mouth drawn up in a disapproving knot. She swept past my mistress without a glance and sailed into her bedchamber, emerging a moment later with an embroidered pocket dangling from her hand.

"Malheureuse," she said with a deadly calm. "Little sinner. Thief."

Mlle Adèle's eyes grew large and her bottom lip began to edge into a pout. "That's mine," she said, reaching for the pocket.

Mme Ursule trapped her wrist in a large, white hand. "You admit, then, to your crime?"

"What crime? The pocket is mine. I didn't steal it."

"Not the pocket, little Jesuit—the silver in the pocket."

My mistress looked blankly at her. "There is nothing in the pocket," she said.

Mme Ursule rolled her dried pea eyes at me. "You, girl. Put your hand in the pocket and show us what you find there."

I obeyed her.

I trust that Colette will not judge me too harshly for my want of spirit. I was a child, a servant. I lived by obeying such orders. And the écu was there, after all. If I hadn't found it, another would have. I remember how it gleamed like a moon in my hand: a silver écu of six livres, nearly half of a year's wages.

Mme Ursule looked triumphant, mademoiselle white and sick. Meeting her eyes, I felt like Judas.

"I've never seen it before," said my mistress at last. "I'm sure I never put it there."

"So young and so wicked," said Mme Ursule, shaking her head. "Mother Abbess will be seriously displeased."

I cannot bear to describe the scenes that ensued, mademoiselle's
increasingly hysterical denials, Mother Abbess' stony indifference. Suffice it to say that in the end, she decided to try my mistress in a mock court with a mock jury of nuns and Mother Abbess playing Pilate upon the bench.

Thirty years later, in 1790, I recall hearing whispers of the Revolutionary Tribunals that would convict a man of treason upon some informer's oath that once he'd heard the accused drink the health of widow Capet. 'Twas on similar evidence that my young mistress was convicted of thieving. The young nun testified to the doll, and an excited Mlle de Montpelier testified to Mlle du Fourchet's disruption of the catechism class, as well as her wicked inability to recite accurately either the Seven Deadly Sins or the Ten Commandments. One Nathalie des Anges had heard her bemoaning the loss of her doll and her book and wishing for the means to buy others. Then I was called to the stand.

I answered Mother Abbess' questions as best I could, swearing all the while that Mlle du Fourchet had never, that she wouldn't, that she couldn't possibly have stolen that écu, that she was far too timid to attempt such a thing, that 'twas all a trick, like the evidence against her, like the cinders in her bed and the pins in her hairbrush. So far I got and no further before Mother Abbess held up her hand.

"Enough," she said. "Vicious creature! Do you think to help your mistress with these malicious lies? You should be whipped. Sit down and give thanks we've other, graver, matters before us."

"Mother Abbess." That was Mlle Hortense, scarlet-faced and trembling with fury, surging up before the whole school like an untidy wave. "Would you whip the girl for telling the truth? If you'd whip liars, you must whip Mlle de Montpelier and Mlle des Anges, who are as precious a pair of devils as ever salted the sugar. As for my sister, she hasn't the spirit to steal milk from a kitten, far less rob an alms-box."

Mother Abbess heard this speech in outraged silence, and when Mlle Hortense had done, stared silently down her nose for some little time longer before asking, "What is the Ninth Commandment, Mlle du Fourchet?"

"This is not the time for a catechism," said Mlle Hortense angrily.

"Nevertheless, Mlle du Fourchet, you will answer."

Mlle Hortense flushed brick-red, bit her lip, and confessed that she did not remember.

"I am not astonished to hear it, Mlle du Fourchet. 'Thou shalt
not bear false witness against thy neighbor.' See you remember it in future. It follows 'Thou shalt not steal.' " She sighed. "What a trial you du Fourchets are to me! Lucifer himself is not so proud as you, Hortense, nor so worldly as Pauline, nor so blasphemous as Adèle." She turned to the jury of nuns. "You are all agreed that Mlle Adèle du Fourchet is guilty of theft as she has been charged?"

The nuns exchanged solemn looks, then as one, they nodded.